Assistance with making space on Start-up Disk

[thermarest]

I'm pretty sure it started with Tiger. The feature called "safe sleep" writes the entire contents of ram to the HD. Then if/when power is lost (battery dies), no data is lost. This happens rarely to me and isn't worth 4GB, nor the time it takes to write that 4GB everytime I close the lid

This little utility helps:
http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/sy...sleep.html